We visited Edinburgh in November to cook a celebratory series of dinners, marking the first anniversary of the opening of Edinburgh Food Studio, a amazing dining room/research lab/collaborative space opened by our friends Ben Reade and Sashana Souza Zanella last year. Josh spent some time working with Ben at Nordic Food Lab in Denmark in 2013, and we have wanted to follow up with more collaboration for a while.

Inspired by their first calendar year of food, we designed a menu of remixes, covers and outright copies. Some dishes were based on their ingredients, some on their techniques, and some in turn were based on the menus of other guest chefs. We combined aspects of dishes that had been made in several iterations, and riffed on elements that had been repeated all through the year. All were subject to the availability of produce, and new versions of each dish materialised every night.

Gary Goldie, a chef and forager, whose May 2016 menu inspired elements of our own, gathered mushrooms and wild herbs for us, and ingredients left over from previous dinners reappeared here and there.

We cooked eight courses, with the help of Alex and Laura, the Studio interns, with Sashana's amazing bread starting the menu and a keenly deliberated drink pairing from their collection.